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1996 to 2006: Great comedy moments in tech

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Comedy

Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 12 Jul 2006 14:15 BST

The Office meets Microsoft
Most managers live in abject fear that they might share any of the shocking idiosyncrasies exhibited by Ricky Gervais' David Brent character in The Office — the BBC's hugely successful TV series. Not so Microsoft's UK management .

It emerged in 2004 that the software giant had enlisted Gervais and his writing partner Steven Merchant to create a series of training videos for its staff. As the actual videos have never been released — perhaps Gervais and Merchant don't want to publicise that they have taken the Microsoft shilling — we can only speculate on the results. Detractors might think that Gervais and Merchant would find plenty of ammunition to work with at Microsoft's UK HQ in Reading but the company actually topped The Times's list of 100 best places to work in 2003 and came second the year before.

However, we'd like to think that the final decision to sign off The Office pair's participation was made by Gates himself after empathising with Brent's now infamous dancing routine.

BlackBerry leaves New Labour red faced
Filling some of the comedy black hole left by The Office this year is the Political satire The Thick of It — a Yes Minister for the post millennium — with its cutting depiction of life inside New Labour. One ferociously obnoxious spin doctor character in the show is an obvious take-off of Tony Blair's press lieutenant Alistair Campbell.

The real-life scourge of Fleet Street is responsible for one of the best home-grown tech gaffes of the last few years, when he accidentally sent a message meant for a colleague to the very journalists he was deriding. According to reports, Campbell meant to email a colleague to indicate he wanted to say "fuck off and cover something important you twats!" to the BBC's Newsnight team, on his BlackBerry device, but accidentally sent the email to the journalists in question.

According to the Evening Standard, Newsnight later received a second email from Campbell suggesting the first email was a joke and should be ignored. Never was a truer word spoken in jest.

Upgrade becomes retrograde
Continuing the theme of government cock-ups, this incident was not exactly comedy but it was certainly farcical. In November 2004, reports emerged that a routine software upgrade knocked out 80 percent of the PCs in the sprawling UK Department of Work and Pensions. Some 80,000 machines were disabled when an upgrade to Windows XP, meant for a small group of machines, was accidentally applied to all the PCs in the department, with predictable results.

The sheer scale of this mishap puts it firmly in the realms of the absurd, although managers at Microsoft and EDS, the company managing the remote upgrade, probably didn't see the funny side. The Government was also unlikely to see the comedic value either, given that the DWP incident was the latest in a long line of spectacular public-sector computer problems, which included the failure of the £450m IT project at the Child Support Agency and the collapse of the £500m Electronic Benefits Transfer System.

Beware of Greeks baring games
It's not only the UK Government that has a hard time managing technology. The Greeks may have been ahead of their time when it came to modern thought and philosophy but they have been distinctly backward at embracing innovations in entertainment. In July 2002, the Greek Government enacted Law Number 3037 which banned electronic games with "electronic mechanisms and software" from public and private places. The blanket ban was introduced after the Government admitted it was incapable of distinguishing innocuous video games from illegal gambling machines. One online report said that even watching a film on DVD — many of which contained promotional games linked to the movie — had resulted in an arrest and a €10,000 fine. The law was eventually restricted to focus only on gambling, but the whole episode did little for Greece's position in the international league of tech-friendly nations.

Your picks?
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